Conservative Coherence, Liberal Discordance

The current dominance of right-wing populist politics across wealthy western nations undoubtedly has many roots and interrelated causal factors. But studying the moral underpinnings of political sense-making has the potential to provide useful insights for devising strategies to counter this trend. Lakoff and Haidt corroborate a number of each other’s key findings relating to which moral facets are critical elements in the moral architecture of individuals from either side of the political spectrum.

On the conservative side of the ideological spectrum, both authors concur that the role of family is fundamental to the conservative worldview, with Haidt evoking Emile Durkheim’s assertion that the hierarchically structured family is the basic conservative social unit, while Lakoff asserts that a hierarchical strict father model of the family is the overarching moral metaphor from which all supplementary conservative moral facets are derived. The conservative perception of family and the primacy with which it is held both consciously and unconsciously appears to exact a significant influence on the political sense-making of conservatives. The strict father morality that Lakoff proposes is disproportionately constituted by the metaphor of moral authority, asserted to be a cornerstone of conservative ideology and holding a high moral priority. This overlaps strongly with Haidt’s assertion that the authority moral foundation is a distinctive and critical element of conservative ideology. This reverence for authority interrelates with and legitimates the conservative conception of family as a hierarchical institution with the father figure as the authority figure. The moral nature of discipline and sacrifice in the pursuit of material success claimed by Lakoff implies that the competitive nature of modern western societies with a strong belief in markets as the arbiters of fair distribution is not just moral, but ideal, as it is a mechanism by which moral, disciplined people can be discerned from lazy, undeserving, immoral individuals. This is also supported by Haidt’s reinterpretation of the conservative understanding of fairness to reflect the notion of proportionality, another way of describing the distribution resulting from the vision of a competitive meritocracy. This idealisation of competition is coherent both with a strict, hierarchical family context that instils the necessary discipline to survive and thrive in a competitive

world, and with notions of legitimate authority, with the state enforcing the rules of this competitive society and ensuring free-riders and cheaters are dealt with harshly. These core elements of conservative ideology: family, legitimate authority, and competition, are not only strongly coherent with each other and form the constituents of a cogent conservative vision of society, but they serve to reinforce the credence among conservatives of this vision. The coherence of this conservative vision of society underpinned by these moral components identified by Lakoff and Haidt may be part of the reason behind the current dominance of conservative politics in the USA and other western countries.

Conversely, there are findings laid forth by Haidt and Lakoff that insinuate potential inconsistencies within the liberal political ideology that may be undermining electoral success for the Democrats in the USA and other left parties in western countries around the world. The prominence of Haidt’s liberty moral foundation in the moral matrix of liberals encapsulates the strong liberal emphasis on self-determination and individual freedoms, whereby the individual is the basic social unit. This is also captured by Lakoff’s liberal metaphors of moral self-development and self-interest. As Haidt has pointed out, the liberty foundation “…operates in tension with the authority foundation” (Haidt, 2012, p. 201), but whereas conservatives have managed to coalesce a legitimate interpretation of authority alongside their (admittedly distinct) penchant for liberty, the notion of authority does not register within liberals’ moral architecture. Lakoff’s liberal moral metaphorical framework similarly has no recognition of authority contained within it either. This absence of a moral interpretation of authority has manifested in a distinguishable liberal aversion and suspicion towards authority that may only be increasing as the process of societal individualisation progresses. Underpinning many of the political goals of liberal political parties are communitarian ideals of a connection between the individual and the community. In order to provide assistance and care to those in need, protect the weak and vulnerable from predatory capitalism, and create a broad program of social infrastructure to foster a harmonious and prosperous society, a frontline of workers and volunteers is needed to materialise it. A vision of this kind of society then necessarily requires a strong level of cooperation amongst citizens in official employment capacity and in voluntary support roles. Regardless of whether, as this thesis has suggested, liberals are disproportionately being affected by the process of individualisation, the resultant increasingly prominent societal notions of self-sufficiency, self-determination, and self-actualisation are likely to erode the practical likelihood of materialising a communitarian vision of society. This

individualisation trend, the pre-existing prominence of the liberty foundation in liberal moral matrices and metaphorical notions of moral self-development and self-interest are acting to push liberally-minded individuals away from this goal, despite it still remaining an implicit element of the liberal political agenda.

The liberal aversion towards authority creates yet another obstacle in creating this kind of society, as strong leadership and an effective judiciary system are crucial in correcting for the insidious elements of modern capitalist societies. Predatory elements in industries such as pharmaceuticals, health insurance, commercial and investment banking, mortgage broking, payday loans and others can only be reigned in by strong and moral political leadership, a judiciary that is non-partisan and ruling in the interests of the people, not those of corporate entities, and entities like federal law enforcement agencies that have historically maintained low levels of support from liberals (Thomson-DeVeaux, 2018). The Occupy movement that emerged in the USA in 2011 is a useful example of the practical manifestation of the left’s anti-authoritarianism, as the movement intentionally stayed leaderless throughout its period of prominence. However, without a clear set of demands or a focal point for achieving political influence, the movement subsided without any clear achievements outside of arguably shifting the terms of political debate. American political philosopher Jodi Dean articulated this issue after the movement had subsided:

“Emphasis on autonomy encouraged people to pursue multiple, separate and even conflicting goals rather than work toward common ones. Celebration of horizontality heightened skepticism toward organizing structures like the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, ultimately leading to the dissolution of both and assertions of leaderlessness as a principle incited a kind of paranoia around leaders who emerged but could not be acknowledged or held accountable as leaders” (Dean, 2012).

This is symptomatic of the relationship many on the left have with legitimate forms of authority and while conservatives simply mobilise to install authoritarian leaders to impose their ideological objectives, liberal apathy toward legitimate political authority can lead to the repeal of many critical liberal institutions. Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 is an example of this phenomenon, as voter turnout was the lowest in twenty years (Wallace, 2016) and he is currently in the process of dismantling much of the liberal legacy of President Obama

including attempts to repeal a greater level of health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

These facets of liberal morality that are highlighted by Haidt and Lakoff, namely an individualistic leaning and an aversion toward authority, while significant elements of liberal political sense-making, are argued here to be counter-productive towards manifesting the cooperative, communitarian vision of society that is similarly prominent within the liberal political ideology. They act as barriers that must be overcome to achieve this vision, rather than as forces tendentially propelling society in this direction and contrast with the seamless conservative interrelationship of the notional hierarchical family with legitimate forms of authority and a competitive society with proportionally distributed material wealth. This coherence of key elements of conservative morality and consequent political sense-making contributes to the propagation of conservative ideology and is potentially one key reason behind the dominance of the conservative side of politics in the USA in recent decades and possibly the current widespread electoral success of right-wing parties across the western world. In contrast, the waning fortunes of many left-wing parties in recent years may be linked to the current and potentially increasing degree of divergence between the fundamental underlying communitarian ideals of such parties and the counterproductive anti-authoritarian and individualistic tendencies that partly constitute the liberal moral architecture. In order to effectively counter this recent current of conservative ascendancy, strategies must be devised that acknowledge these antithetical elements and seek to ameliorate them. Figure 6 below depicts the coherence of the aforementioned elements of the conservative moral architecture and the discordance of the liberal equivalents.

Figure 6. The coherence and discordance of key facets of conservative and liberal morality (Novy/Wilson, own elaboration)